Menu

Arthritis (Disease Or Medical Condition)

What is a slipped disc? So, everyone’s heard of the term “slipped disc”. It might be someone you know, it might be someone you work with, it might be you. Having had some sort of back problem – usually one that is pretty severe and they so, “Oh, you are suffering from a slipped disc!” So today we are going to talk about what that actually is, what it means and what’s really happening. So, for those of you that don’t know I’m going to pull out a spine here. This is somewhat like what your spine looks like in your body. So we’ve got bone all the way down to the pelvis and between those bones – here in the yellow bits – those are your discs. The bones are hard – like bone would be. The discs are made of connective tissue.

So they’re soft, stretchy, fibrous connective tissue and the discs of the spine – theres a little bit of fluid in the middle to help control how it works. Now, when we think of a slipped disc – I’ve actually seen this, how it’s made in a diagram sometimes, they show this disc as being a separate piece that can shift from where it belongs. So imagine like this one here that’s loose – just imagine that it could move. And when we think of a slipped disc we think that disc has moved from where it belongs. In a real human body, all these bones and these discs are completely encased in connective tissue. These discs are actually made of ceonnective tissue and the fibers from this connective tissue goes into the bones so it can’t slip.

If you were to take this out of the human body and try to separate this you wouldn’t be able to separate it. You are not strong enough and most, uggh, it would take a machine to try to separate those so there’s no way that that disc can actually slip. To make a more accuarate analogy I’ve made something here. What I’ve made here – this is using two coffeee cups and some tape. We’re goning to imagine that this is more likely how a disc works and how it looks. We’re going to picture that this is a bone in your spine and this is a bone in our spine.